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Lost Season Finds a Home in Canada

Or, should I say, “almost finds a home.” I am sad to report that this production fell victim to the coronavirus pandemic, becoming one of the many, many cancellations that occurred in theatre worldwide. I’m grateful to my director, Catherine Hume, and cast for all their time and preparation (Debra Grosman as Toni, Selene Lopez Reyes as Chloe, and Jasmine Huang as The Butterfly). I wish I could have seen you perform!

Alumnae Theatre in Toronto!

It was a busy spring. It was so busy that I never spent enough time in Falmouth to plant our vegetable garden. Aargh! But I learned a couple of things as a result. First, I learned that fennel, if left to go to seed (as I’d allowed it to do the previous summer), spreads prolifically. When we got down for an overnight Memorial Day weekend, I found myself gazing out on a sea of lacy, young fennel plants blanketing the spot in the yard where my garden used to be.

There was no time to weed that day, so the fennel kept growing, and by July some of it was three or four feet tall. While other weeds had joined this “garden party,” it was still mostly fennel. Sigh. I tried to make the best of it, trimming some soft fennel tops now and then for the salad, but mostly I just grumbled.

Then, our good friends the Fletchers came for a weekend. They commiserated with me about the lost garden season (having a teenage son who is about the same age as our daughter, they understand the pace and complexity of life right now). Then, as we gazed out on the fennel forest, we saw the butterfly. It was mostly black, with some striking white and blue spots along its wing edges. There was also a dramatic orange spot with a black center at the base of each wing; they looked like crazy, cartoon eyes. The butterfly was very drawn to the fennel.

Stephanie snapped some photos (you can see one of them below) and began to do some research, which led to the second thing this experience taught me. As we sipped wine in the back yard that evening, she showed us her pictures and announced that it was a female Eastern Black Swallowtail (the females have blue spots, males yellow), and that fennel is one of the few plants upon which this butterfly lays its eggs.

How cool, right? The vegetable garden had become a butterfly garden. How cool.

Still, at some point weeds are weeds. Early the next morning I yanked them. When everyone else awoke to find the fennel gone, there was a mild insurrection. It was good-humored, but there was real passion underneath it. I could sense that. Hmm, I thought. Might there be a short play in this?

I wrote Lost Season a few days later. It’s a poignant play (if I do say so myself) about a grieving grandmother and granddaughter who begin to find a way through their grief with the help of a butterfly, honest communication, and a treasured family recipe that inherits a new secret ingredient. After a well-received cold read at Playwrights Platform early this fall, I began submitting the play, and Alumnae Theatre in Toronto said yes. Their annual New Ideas Festival, which takes place in March 2020, will be my first opportunity to see Lost Season on its feet. I’ll spend a few days with them developing and revising the play before the weekend performance.

I guess things happen for a reason. But if you think I’m planting fennel in the spring, think again. That stuff spreads like crazy.

You can read, recommend, and request rights to produce Lost Season and my other plays at New Play Exchange.

The Eastern Black Swallowtail and the fennel forest that inspired Lost Season.
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Last Gasp bound for Chicago

Last Gasp has been selected for the 2020 Mid-America Theatre Conference in Chicago. I’ve had fun working on this play, an apocalyptic dark comedy about an imagined climate-change end game. I try hard to keep the audience guessing about what what and who they are watching. That is all I will say. No spoilers here!

MATC is a development conference, so it will give me a chance to work some kinks out of a script that owes a debt to The Twilight Zone, and that some have found confusing. I may need to weave in a bit more exposition, but I don’t want to make it too easy to follow; it’s meant to be a play that makes you wonder and think.

Two other playwrights I “met” through the Playwright Submission Binge will have plays at the conference: Marj O’Neill-Butler and Lindsay Partain. I have a lot of respect for their work and am excited to meet them face to face.

You can read, recommend, or request rights to produce Last Gasp and my other plays at New Play Exchange.

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Black Santa x4 in 2019

Boston, Albuquerque, Lansing, and Orlando. Black Santa was my little play that could this year.

I wrote the play because I wanted to explore a disconnect that seems to exist between the reported experience of blacks in America and the outlook of whites, many of whom define racism in ways that conveniently allow them to exempt themselves: flying the confederate flag, for example, or using the n-word. “What ignorance,” we say when we hear of such things. “Thank God I don’t see color.” Enter Jan and John from Black Santa.

The truth is, we all see color, and we’re all biased. “Seems like Disney has a princess for everyone these days,” John says, in the opening moments of my ten-minute play. We’ve all been steeped in a culture that privileges whiteness and marginalizes people of color, especially people perceived as black. Because we can’t admit our own biases and privilege, even to ourselves–because we are so defensive and fearful of being branded racist–we avoid the issue altogether, or we grow defensive or dismissive. We ask people of color to explain how our actions were biased and hurtful and, in doing so, we invalidate and re-victimize them; we prop up the systems that perpetuate racism and racial bias. We do this.

Make no mistake, overt and dramatic examples of hate and bias continue to occur, and they are indefensible. However, it’s far more common for racial bias to manifest in subtle ways: the white man who moves his wallet to his front pocket when a group of black teenagers boards the subway he is riding; the white woman who “notices” a black person driving an expensive car in a nice neighborhood and assumes the worst; the white man who “compliments” a black teen’s hair in a way that leaves the teen feeling different and singled out. The white colleague who can’t seem to wrap his head around the idea of a black Santa Claus, and his white co-worker who is so concerned with maintaining her own position of authority as Social Committee Chair that she simultaneously approves and invalidates the idea.

Black Santa attempts to explore the pernicious nature racism. It imagines what happens when a company’s Social Committee, dominated by well-meaning whites, is faced with a request that requires them to examine their white privilege. I was thrilled that the play had two full productions in 2019: Playwrights’ Platform’s 47th Annual Festival of New Plays (Boston, MA) and the Renegade Theatre Festival (Lansing, MI). It also had two staged readings: Fusion Theatre Company’s “Second Seven” (Albuquerque, NM) and The Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s New Play Development Workshop (Orlando, FL).

I did not get to see the Lansing and Albuquerque performances, but I was honored to have such a talented group perform the play in Boston: Joshua Wolf Coleman, director; Arthur Williams III (Marvin), Bibiana Jaramillo (Sue), Kathleen Monteleone (Jan), and Jon Shulman (John). Here they in their final rehearsal before the performances at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre:

At ATHE’s national conference in Orlando, I got to spend four days developing with this amazing team: Ben Lambert, director; Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez, dramaturg; Jennifer Ivey, scenographer; Harry Waters, Jr. (Marvin), Natasha Yannacanedo (Sue), Julienne Greer (Jan), and George Nelson (John). It culminated with a terrific and well-received reading. I came away with a better script and an even deeper appreciation for the collaborative nature of theatre.

You can read, recommend, and request rights to produce Black Santa and my other plays at New Play Exchange.

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60 Plays in 60 minutes: #1MPF

I had a blast writing for the 2019 Boston One-Minute Play Festival, and just as much fun watching it. To see sixty plays performed in sixty minutes is both inspiring and profoundly disorienting.

The One Minute Play Festival (#1MPF) is a national organization that produces many festivals around the country each year. At each, they work with local writers, which allows them to bill the annual festival as a social barometer, something that takes the pulse of the communities and, overall, of the nation. I think it’s a really cool concept.

The prompt was simple: write one original, sixty second play that is a response to the world as you see it in this moment. There was one notable limitation: No Trump references, impersonations, allusions. My play, Walled, walked up to that line, but I don’t think it crossed it. Obviously, it was inspired by the various reactions to Trump’s border-wall proposal and the general attitudes and policies about immigration that are behind it. However, I don’t see it as a play about Trump, or even a play about immigration. Walled is a play about fear and the things that happen when fear rules us.

David Marino directed Walled. The actors were Catherine Lee Christie, Scott Colford, Pete Desiderio, and Ethan Selby.

The team who performed Walled and the other plays in my “clump” at the 2019 Boston One-Minute Play Festival. They killed it! L to R: David Marino, director; Catherine Lee Christie; Scott Colford; Lynn Wilcott, Ethan Selby, and Pete Desiderio.

You can read, recommend and request rights to produce Walled and my other plays at New Play Exchange.

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Enter Four Dinosaurs and a Cockroach…

Are there really people in this world who believe that humans are not to blame for climate change and, therefore, we should not try to do something about it? Okay. Fine. Enter four dinosaurs and a cockroach, who are facing a potential extinction event, themselves. Or maybe two dinosaurs and a cockroach. Or even four dinosaurs, a cockroach, and a rat. I have three versions of Every Creeping Thing.

As I write this post, Every Creeping Thing been produced twice. The first production was the small-cast version at Oldies but Goodies, a festival of five-minute play Festival presented by Playwrights Round Table and Valencia College in Orlando, Florida (Daniel Garces, director; Cast: Katia Avalos, Josh Hernandez and Alexis Vazquez). The second, featuring the full cast, was at ArtsBonita’s Funny Shorts Live! Festival in Bonita Springs, Florida (Janina Britolo, director; Cast: Melissa Henning, Carolyn Bronson, Luis Pages, Kristin Voit, and Janina Britolo.) I realize that two productions of one climate change satire is not even strong anecdotal evidence; nonetheless, they seem to be thinking about climate change in Florida. Go figure.

The picture below is from the Bonita Springs production and, yes, that beach ball with rainbow polka dots is meant to be an asteroid. Actually it’s meant to be the asteroid. They had fun with this play. I had fun writing it, and I hope it makes people laugh. But I also hope it makes them think, and act. Because satire is not the same as comedy, and climate change is no joke.

The cast of Every Creeping Thing at Funny Shorts Live!, presented by ArtsBonita (September 2019). From left: Melissa Henning, Carolyn Bronson, Luis Pages, Kristin Voit, Janina Britolo, who also directed the performance.

The Farmington Daily Times published more shots of the Bonita Springs cast in action, and here’s some coverage of Funny Shorts Live! in Broadway World and the Naples Daily News.

You can read, recommend, and request rights to produce Every Creeping Thing and my other plays on New Play Exchange.

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Something True (I Hope)

I get a lot of my ideas from NPR interviews. That’s where Holy and Unruly came from (thank you Laura Sook Duncombe for writing Pirate Women and talking so compellingly about that meeting between Queen Elizabeth and Grace O’Malley). It’s also where the idea for Something True was born. I was listening to a moving story about a choir program that supports people in addiction treatment. Talking of the group’s performances, one of the participants said something like “It moves people because they know they are hearing something true.”

For whatever reason, that moved me. It’s not like I hadn’t heard art referred to as “truth” before. Maybe it was just context: art helping people in such dire straits. Or maybe it was true. I found myself sitting in the car thinking, I want to write about that idea: “something true.”

It’s a long way from addiction treatment to my emotional roller coaster of a short play about young lovers navigating the tricky waters of intimacy. But, there’s no accounting for inspiration. That’s the direction my fingers took me once they hit the keyboard. What are the things in our lives that are deeply, movingly, heart-stoppingly “true,” and why do we experience those things so infrequently?

My answer to the second half of that question (the easier half) is: because those things are hard and often frightening. I don’t know about you, but experiencing something that I know, at my core, to be “true” can be a terrifying and awe-inspiring moment.

My truth isn’t always your truth. However, there are some categories of experience that bend more sharply toward that idea of fundamental truth. Something True touches on two of them: art and love. People often describe the play as a philosophical exploration of truth as a concept, but I’ve always seen it as a play about love. Miki is on the cusp of proposing to Jo when Jo ask to hear “something true.” This seemingly innocent request sends them into a downward spiral that almost ends their relationship. They have to move past the selfish motivations that prompted Jo’s request and Miki’s discomfort with it; they have to realize that love isn’t something you “get” from another person, it’s something you give, freely and unconditionally. If there’s anything true in this play, that’s it.

I purposely wrote Miki and Jo as gender neutral characters. What does gender have to do with love, right? I didn’t think it made sense for the play to suggest that “true” love involved some pre-conceived, externally applied combination of genders. That suggestion would have undercut the entire premise of the play; it would not have been true.

For that reason, I was thrilled when the first three productions each portrayed Miki’s and Jo’s gender differently. They were women at the Short and Sweet Festival in Sydney, Australia (Teneale Clifford, director; Mathilde Anglade as Jo ; Casey Campbell as Miki ), non-binary at the Downtown Urban Arts Festival in NYC (Holly Wright, director; Jamie Lowenstein, Jo; Ryan Beaghler, Miki), and heterosexual at the Theatre Workshop of Owensboro’s 2019 Summer Shorts Festival in Owensboro, Kentucky (Nate Gross, director; ). Yay, love!

The image immediately above is from the Kentucky production. Up at the top of this post is the promotional poster for the performances at Short and Sweet Sydney. Here’s a video of Jamie’s and Ryan’s performance in New York.

You can read, recommend, and request rights to produce Something True and my other plays on New Play Exchange.

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Pretending at TWO’s 2018 Summer Shorts Festival

I love Owensboro, Kentucky. Tucked along the south bank of the Ohio River, it’s about equidistant from Nashville, Louisville and Cincinnati. It’s one of the cultural hubs of Western Kentucky, with a vibe that reminds me a lot of the town where I grew up, Bellingham, Washington. But if you really want to know why it has a special place in my heart , keep reading.

It was a real honor to have my play, Pretending, appear in the Theatre Workshop of Owensboro’s 2018 Summer Shorts Festival. In fact, that July 21 performance of Pretending at the Trinity Center in Owensboro, pictured below, was the very first time one of my plays was ever fully produced. That’s a moment I won’t forget.

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Pretending at New York Theatre Festival

Here’s a fun fact: My short play, Pretending, went up at The Hudson Guild Theatre in July 2018, the very same space where Tennessee Williams premiered A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur back in January 1979. It was a terrific three-day run (mine; I’m sure Tennessee Williams’ play ran for far longer) at the New York Theatre Festival.

Holly Wright did a wonderful job directing this play about an aspiring writer whose fear of failure undermines far more than his productivity as a writer. Michael Anderson was fantastic as Bob, our frustrated (and frustrating) hero. Julia Enos Woods was so powerful as Susan, Bob’s wife. Susan has had it with Bob, but Julia did a wonderful job of finding the love beneath Susan’s deep dissatisfaction. Justine Musselman stole the show as Alexa and Siri, Bob’s AI enablers. Larry Saperstein‘s lighting design captured the mood of the play. Here’s a video of one performance.

The feedback I sometimes get on Pretending is: “not enough happens, dramatically.” For me, that’s always been the point. Pretending is about a life that’s stuck in neutral, a prospect that becomes more and more terrifying as one ages (as I age). You get one, brief shot at life. It’s easy to let it all slip by, until one day you look back and say: “What have I done?” That day of reckoning is coming for Bob. He begins this play in denial about this fact; by the end, he’s resigned to its inevitability. That psychological transition from denial to resignation interested me more than the moment when Bob decides he wasted his life.

It was great to have so many friends and family see this show. Here are a few shots from the dinner Laura, Emma and I hosted after the Saturday night performance: